NewsTwit – Realtime News Flashes on Twitter

NewsTwit aggregates and filters news flashes from all over Twitter to present them in an organised way so you can keep up-to-date with the news as it happens. It’s a US site, although some sections such as technology have a more international appeal, but it’s clear to see how this idea could do well in various countries. An international version would also be interesting.

Each news flash appears as a tweet with a link to the full story, and the tweets are organised by menu choice. These are National News (US), Sports, Tech, Science, Iran and Other, and the two main categories next to National News on the menu are The Left and The Right. I took a look at the stories in these final two sections and was quite intrigued as to the reasons they were grouped. I can’t quite imagine UK news being grouped that way.

National curiosity aside, I found it very hard to resist clicking on the links to go to the news stories, and I think this is a very productive use of Twitter. Social networks like Twitter allow breaking news to appear immediately. The ability to aggregate that and filter out and arrange the best stories so quickly makes Twitter a great way to read the news. How website organisers decide to filter and arrange those stories will be of interest to readers and traditional publishers.